1 year of Tumor-LN-oC: Working towards a Tumor-Lymph Node-On chip platform

Last week, the Tumor-LN-oC consortium met in Eindhoven for the project’s M12 progress meeting. The meeting officially concluded the first year of the project, which was appropriately celebrated over a common dinner.

The M12 meeting focused on sharing updates, jointly solving any challenges that occurred and planning the next steps, but also made time for informal discussions and networking between the partners. Agenda items mainly concerned the progress and future plans regarding the various Tumor-LN-oC components, which are currently being developed and tested independently by partners and will one day form the Tumor-LN-oC platform. Partners also discussed at length the experiments around cell migration and the interaction between the tumor and lymph node cells on the preliminary chips.

In its role as management, dissemination and exploitation partner, AMIRES led the sessions on project management, communication and dissemination efforts, as well as a structured dialogue on the future commercialisation efforts of the consortium.

The chip fabrication workshop in the TU/e Microfab laboratory on the last day gave all team members a hands-on experience of the various steps of manufacturing and assembling the Tumor-LN-oC microfluidic chip.

In order to reach the ultimate objective of the project – a TRL 5 tumor-lymph node-on-chip platform, which will connect surgically removed human primary tumors and lymph node tissue (LN) from the same lung cancer patient (a “biological twin” of the patient) – a lot of work remains to be done. Nevertheless, the platform, which will offer various analytical possibilities to analyse the cancer patient’s LN metastasis activity and monitor the treatment response, seems one step closer.

We are grateful to our partners for their commitment to the project and are looking forward to continuing the work in the next 3 years of project implementation!